Huffington Post writer Monica Bauer claims that she has “A New Argument for Gun Control,” but sounds like the same old worn-out lies to me.

The gun lobby frames the gun control debate using overheated rhetoric about rights that sound suspiciously like an appeal to masculinity; real men don’t let anyone take away their guns. How childish. Real men don’t need guns to be powerful. It’s time we put this argument in it’s proper perspective: ready access to guns is, in the terminology of Catholic dogma (but logical to anybody who can think) an occasion of sin. If you want to avoid committing a sin, stay away from the immediate temptation. It’s a pretty foolproof method. If you don’t want to gain weight, stay away from the cookie section of the supermarket. If it’s not in your kitchen cabinet when you’re hungry, it’s far less likely to end up on your hips.

Bauer’s argument is that you shouldn’t have individual rights, because there is a danger you might use them irresponsibly. This isn’t a new argument. It’s the exact same mindset that has championed tyranny, democide, and ruin since the beginning of human history.

Abusing Catholicism to frame her argument simply proves to us that Bauer knows as little about religion as she does the concept of liberty. It’s a repellent and dishonest attempt to claim that being faithful to God means you should bow down before criminals and the blunt force of the state.

I suspect that she’d be stunned to learn that the Catholic Church has always supported self defense, up to and including justifiable homicide when necessary. Not only does the Church consider self defense an individual right, but they feel there is a duty to defense the lives of others, as the Vatican makes plain:

Legitimate defense

2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”⁶⁵

2264 Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.⁶⁶

2265 Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.

Clearly, the Catholic Church believes in your right to individual self defense, even if Bauer does not.

Perhaps the single most revealing statement in her “new argument” is Bauer’s revolting thought that the government has rights… you don’t.

She doesn’t understand the Bill or Rights in the slightest.

Should the government have the right to regulate access to something that makes it incredibly easy to turn a dispute into a death? Hell yes. This is common sense. It is such common sense that in every other advanced democracy in the world, access to guns is controlled as a matter of course. In America today, the opposite has happened; one party has declared that access to guns is not only a right to be protected, but something to be encouraged. In state houses controlled by Republican majorities, the lawmakers are busy trying to expand places where guns can be allowed, to include bars and college campuses. Yes, by all means, let’s allow young people in the throes of hormonal swings, who are living in close quarters with strangers for the first time in their lives, and who are known to binge-drink, their God-given rights to pack heat.

Bauer’s entire argument boils down to a fundamental mistrust of people to act in their own best interests, while asserting that the mythical benevolent state acts altruistically on behalf of the citizenry. The undeniable historical fact that governments have murdered far more citizens than all individual criminal acts and wars between nations combined is apparently irrelevant to her.

Some people are more afraid of freedom and personal responsibility than the chains of oppression.

All Monica Bauer has revealed here is that she is quite happy to enslave others, so that she would be more secure as a slave to government herself.